Jailed Australian journalist Peter Greste will spend Unesco's World Press Freedom Day behind bars in Eygpt, simply for doing his job.

He says his case has become an emblem for the need for freedom of press worldwide.

In a message read by his parents in Sydney on Friday, Greste said the irony of his sending greetings from Mulhaq Al Masra Prison hardly needed mentioning.

"Yet here we are, the Al Jazeera three, facing our 126th day of detention and a seventh appearance before an Eygptian court on charges of terrorism," he said.

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Greste, a reporter with the Al Jazeera network, and television producers Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed have been detained since December 29 on charges of helping terrorist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. They will make their seventh request for bail on Saturday.

Greste said many local journalists were also in jail because of what Egyptian authorities described "as their own war on terror".

His parents Lois and Juris Greste were "panic stricken" when they heard that nearly 700 members of the Muslim Brotherhood had been sentenced to death.

"It sent cold shivers down our spines," said Juris Greste, who had travelled with his wife to Sydney to attend the annual Press Freedom Dinner on Friday night.

Greste was one of more than 200 journalists who were in prisons around the world.

At the dinner, Walkley award-winning investigative reporters Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker paid tribute to the 71 journalists killed in the line of duty last year. Since 1992, nearly one journalist has been killed every week.

On Thursday, the body of Canadian documentary maker David Walker was found near the Gate of Death close to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. His family alleged he was killed because of a documentary on the Khmer Rouge.

"Few of us would have the courage to practise true investigative journalism in places like Mexico, where your head can end up next to your laptop on a road as a message to others," said The Age’s McKenzie.

The Asia-Pacific region remained one of the most dangerous places for reporters, with 10 killed in the Philippines, 10 in Pakistan, eight in India and six in Afghanistan, according to a report on secrecy and surveillance released on Friday by the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

In Kabul, Sardar Ahmad, a 40-year-old reporter with Agence France-Presse was shot dead with his wife and two of their three children. His two-year-old son Abuzar Ahmad – the only one in the family to survive – was shot six times including once in the skull, said the report.

In the Philippines, Rubylita Garia was shot dead in front of her son and 10-year-old granddaughter. In Cambodia, Suon Chan was beaten to death with stones and bamboo sticks. In the largest democracy in the world, India, two journalists were gang raped.

While the risks to Australian journalists weren’t as great as those facing foreign reporters, The Age's Baker said domestic reporters faced increasing threats. The rich and powerful were increasingly using litigation to pursue sources, lodge defamation writs or scare off the media, while policing and anti-corruption bodies were also pressuring reporters to reveal their sources.

Courts were increasingly granting suppression orders, with Victoria alone awarding at least one every day that the courts sat, said the alliance,

With surveillance of reporters increasing, it was "harder than at any time before to contact a journalist over a phone or a computer without leaving a trace", said Baker.

Juris Greste said his son's long detention had prompted him to ask what the world would be like without journalists and freedom of speech. "We can run down the line ... the Joseph Conrads, the Hemmingways, the Dickenses, who told the story of the day, of the times. And when you reflect that way, it helped me to understand that the world would be a different place if we had not had the records of those pioneering journalists.”

The United Nations said 456 journalists had been forced into exile since 2008. In addition to the journalists who were killed last year, 14 had died this year and many had been caught in the cross-fire of armed hostilities.

"These are alarming figures," said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "Behind each statistic stands a man or a woman simply going about their lawful business.”